Cher: Closer to the Truth – review

Thursday 10 October 2013 16.15 EDT
First published on Thursday 10 October 2013 16.15 EDT

"Getting older sucks the big one," Cher said recently, yet ageing seems to have instilled a fierce energy. On her last album, in 2001, she was a bellowing dance-commander, and now she's gone one better, cranking up both the beats and her propensity for blasting. And she can blast like nobody else: Pink and Jake Shears are credited as backing vocalists on I Walk Alone and Take it Like a Man respectively, but they're inaudible against Cher's Auto-Tuned foghorn. Happily, though, her many producers and writers have matched her with a batch of pounding Eurodisco tracks that can take the punishment. There's a reason the single Woman's World reached No 1 on the US dance chart: it's classic diva territory, combining empowerment sentiments, wonderfully kitsch techno and Cher's most commanding performance. The first half of the album is a similar campstravganza – Take It Like a Man indeed – but the second peters out into MOR. Did she really need to cover the Miley Cyrus ballad-warbler I Hope You Find It? Then again, she's Cher, and what producer would be brave enough to say no?

After five decades in show business, Cher is funnier and more outspoken than ever. She tells Rebecca Nicholson about Miley Cyrus, America's lurch to the right – and whether Dalí really gave her a vibrator